


St. Agnes

by Etoiles_Filantes



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Internalised Homophobia, M/M, Pining, and his equally possible crush on ronan, brief descriptions of cattle burning, brief reference to ronan's possible crush on/attraction to joseph kavinsky, but are also really gay and desperately in love with this one boy with freckles and elegant hands, even if you went to Hell straight after, even just for a moment, referenced past suicide attempt, that you wished more than anything in the world that you could hold, the crossings of catholicism and homosexuality, what to do when you believe in God so much it hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27998769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etoiles_Filantes/pseuds/Etoiles_Filantes
Summary: There are freckles on him still, Ronan notices, the last fading marks of summer. A slight tan, too, a dustiness to his hair. Everything about him is dust, of trailer parks and motor shops and ambition, and Ronan holds his breath lest it should blow him away.You don’t find God by looking for Him, Father O’Malley told him once, at a Sunday school, at a funeral, at the police station.You find God and see the world through love of Him.Yet Ronan holds his breath, Spirit blown into Man shaped from Earth creating Life, and he looks.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 5
Kudos: 85





	St. Agnes

**Author's Note:**

> so i haven't read the raven cycle in like four years but i've had no less than two religious awakenings since then and apparently my protestant lesbian ass really wanted to write about a catholic gay disaster being about as in love as she's currently denying that she is

The church lies at the end of a slim stone road, bent and scaled as a serpent. Every Sunday, parishioners walk its back, evading the holy grounds and grass stretching from speared mounts to creaking gates. At weddings, once or twice a month, the bride and groom walk it, too, one in high heels expertly placed on the flattest parts of stones, one fortunate enough to not have to think of anything but rice and receptions and conjugal rights.

Only at funerals is the serpent’s back abandoned, the grass downtrodden and the holy grounds upended, ready to swallow dark wood and dust and tears.

When Niall Lynch was buried, casket closed and sons even more so, it was the first time Ronan veered from the road. For years afterwards, he would make sure to do so regularly; place a toe in the soil, a heel, an entire foot, a drunken stumble between the raised stones.

Never near the back. Never near his father.

Never on Sundays.

It is not a Sunday tonight. Tonight, unholy days stretch on either side of midnight, and the serpent’s scales are stained with blood, twelve drops in total, hidden in cracks and creaks and the darkness just past twilight. It is early November, and light is forgotten as the colour of leaves.

When he was nine years old, Ronan watched Father O’Malley pull from his robes a large vintage key and open the church.

When he was nine years old, Ronan woke from a dream of cold and safety with a key next to his pillow.

Ronan turned eighteen years old only days ago, and the church opens for him as it has for as long as he can remember. The inside is dark, wooden innards and a spine of stone he has walked enough to know with his eyes closed.

He keeps them open.

The crucifix hangs above the altar, golden and worn by time and countless eyes. In the dark, Ronan can make out the red of blood on hands and feet. The eyes, too, should he raise his own, dark and filled with suffering. Forgiveness just beneath.

He doesn’t know if he deserves forgiveness. If he even wants it.

As loudly as possible, rage red by his nose and lip and in every line of his body, he throws himself down on a pew, legs lifted and ankles folded on the back of that in front of him. As usual, Jesus remains quiet. As if anger is something which holds a place in His house, too.

Anger, lust, pride, greed, envy, gluttony, sloth.

His birth certificate proclaims his middle name Niall, meaning all seven.

The pew in which he sits reads Niall, too, and it reads Lynch, for enough money by that name was funnelled into the organisation running it and wherever else they wished for a name to be too much to ask in the face of grief. It is the pew in which his father sat when he first arrived in the new world, a toddler on his hip, an infant and a wife arrived from Ireland months later, and the pew his family still calls their own.

It is the pew on which, as narcissi flowers bloomed beyond the church gates, Ronan nearly bled out.

He doesn’t remember much, other than the dream; creatures of darkness and fire, a forest dripping with hate, the thick and unswallowable taste of disgust filling his throat and spilling from his lips as slime black as the night sky when all stars had burned out. There had been laughter, too, high-pitched and cruel, echoing from one end of the world to another as it carried him into the dream and marvelled at what it there saw.

There had been a knife, and it had been claws.

The hospital had been cold when he finally woke up – for good, not the hazy, hallucinatory not-memories of blood and sirens and laughter and the wooden Jesus staring into his eyes as they bled in sync – and he found his wrists bandaged.

There was no knife. He never did find out if it had stayed in the dream, or in the church, or in Kavinsky’s sweaty palms, or if it had never existed at all. Instead, there were questions, endless and clipped and professional and weeping. He hadn’t answered a single one. It wasn’t what they thought. It wasn’t any of their fucking business. It was a secret, and Niall Lynch had taught him how to treat secrets.

In the parking lot, Declan had punched him and told him how Matthew had begun to fade. His eyes had been red with fury and the lingering aftermath of a frat party. Like a hypocrite, he told him not to drive. Ronan did so anyway.

 _Suicide is a sin_ , Father O’Malley told him after Mass that Sunday, not without kindness.

 _I’ll show you sin_ , Ronan had wanted to say, but nodded instead. Excused himself. Driven to the forest and punched the trees until one of his sutures opened and blood flowed anew, dripping down his bruised knuckles and aching fingers until it hit the moss below, colouring it the shade of death.

 _I’ll write something real feeling-y on your gravestone_ , Gansey had threatened without malice when he returned home. It was far too late for him to stay up.

 _Death is not as fun as they say_ , Noah whispered in his ear before pressing the ghost of a kiss to his neck and slipping soundlessly back out of his room that he had never entered in the first place.

 _I love you_ , Matthew said, and Ronan said it back.

 _What the fuck are you?_ Kavinsky asked, car keys between his knuckles and a wild look in his eyes. Behind him, a new Mitsubishi stood white and shining, ready to pounce and bite and tear, and Ronan wondered – not for the first time, not for the last time – what Kavinsky would do if he pushed him up against it. If he’d kick his teeth in or bend him over the hood. Which of the two he’d prefer.

 _An abomination_ , he answered, and Kavinsky’s laughter made his sutures ache.

The wounds had healed since, the string taken out, the scars faded thin and white and nearly invisible when he remembers to put on sunscreen in the summer.

He can still remember the creatures, melting and screaming and burning eternally. His name, they had been screaming, his and theirs.

Above the altar, Jesus looks down in agony and pity, blood flowing from wounds that will never close and which Ronan has never needed to put his fingers in.

What he never told anyone - what he will never tell anyone - is that he felt Him that night, as they bled in sync and he prepared to join Him. He had been there, gentle eyes and unwavering presence, with His lap beneath Ronan’s head and His fingers running through unruly curls that were no longer there. And for the first time in years, Ronan had felt truly at peace.

He closes his eyes – in prayer or sleep, in meditation, in whatever the fuck else people like to call what he knows to be prayer – and he prays, for that is the kind of man that he is. Mercy and absolution, thankfulness and wrath. He prays, and the gentle sounds of another’s presence does not reach him until a body slips into the pew next to him.

He doesn’t startle.

He didn’t expect him, and yet he always does.

Ronan says nothing, and Adam doesn’t, either. They both have their reasons to be where they are, and both reasons begin with home and end with something far too difficult to name.

The garage, Ronan knows, before the smell of sweat and gasoline reaches his nose. Before he looks at Adam’s hands, and isn’t that a fucking miracle.

Kavinsky, Adam knows, or thinks he knows, for Ronan has secrets beneath secrets and a liar for a brother.

On the crucifix, Jesus looks at them in pain and in forgiveness, and Ronan doesn’t looks back long enough to see if he can find judgement in those eyes, too. Instead, he looks at Adam, glances out of the corner of his eyes, as he always does. A planet to the sun, a dove to the one point of land amid an ocean spanning a world.

He looks tired.

He always looks tired.

He looks beautiful, because he always does that, too. Tired and beautiful, and Ronan wants to cut him open and hide in his chest almost as much as he wants to open himself up and allow Adam to sleep there until only beauty is left.

Were he less of a selfish creature, he’d tell him to fuck off ( _go the fuck to sleep, my Achilles, my Alexander, Thebian lover of mine_ ) and leave him alone.

Selfishness is a sin, too, has to be, but he’s going to Hell anyway. He has long since decided to roll up in style.

At his side, where Ronan wishes he would stay until St. Peter separates them by force - because Ronan would fight back tooth and nails - Adam stifles a yawn.

( _My David, my John, come mourn by my feet - !_ )

Above the altar, illuminated now by stars and a moon half hidden, the Saviour draws His last breath, and the sky tears in grief.

“Would you like me to pray with you?”

_Soul of my soul_

“Do you even believe in God?”

_to whom I give my cape and my sword, my sister and life_

“I’m not sure. But you do.”

He does. Loathsome sinner as he is, wrath in his veins spilling from his nose and lip and knuckles, lust pushing at the seams of shame and fear, love curled in the pit of his stomach like the curdled milk of sleeping cows.

In nature, the toxicity of animals shows itself in bright colours, the dangers of a predator in its silence and ruthlessness.

Adam is open where he sits, body angled ever so slightly towards Ronan, expression patient but tired, pure exhaustion pushing at his seams, so much tighter than Ronan’s.

“Or do you just want to come on up?”

Hope, too, will one day be a weapon of St. Peter’s.

Perhaps Ronan, too, deserves to be crucified. Perhaps that is what he searches for, in the sharp smiles and sharper words of Joseph Kavinsky, or in the rush of a car nearing the edge of a cliff. Perhaps, then, he will find the peace of narcissi in bloom.

The stairs to the attic are thin and worn, screeching in protest at every movement, and Ronan is once more reminded of how Adam needs to eat more. Or how the church has accepted him into its heart where Ronan stands as a heretic screaming by the gates.

He keeps his eyes sideways when Adam digs out his keys three steps above him.

_(For should your eye lead you to sin - )_

The door shuts gently, as much by Adam’s hand as Ronan’s boot. Another preference, and he should've known He would love him as much as he does (as he loves Him, and that’s another road he refuses to tread, for Sunday school teachings still ring in his ears and he has no knife with which to carve out his heart).

A hand on his shoulder, tired and worn, a short-circuit of Ronan’s inner workings, and he is lead to the edge of Adam’s bed, pushed down without protest and waiting with baited breath as Adam returns with a small first aid kit.

Right. Fight. Blood no longer flowing, and still the sting of antiseptic on nearly-open wounds.

Not as bad as they could've been. Not as bad as they've been before and will be again.

Adam’s face is close to his, dark circles masking nothing but concern and irritation, a set to his jaw revealing a year’s worth of acceptance of the foolishness of new friends.

Friends.

There are freckles on him still, Ronan notices, the last fading marks of summer. A slight tan, too, a dustiness to his hair. Everything about him is dust, of trailer parks and motor shops and ambition, and Ronan holds his breath lest it should blow him away.

 _You don’t find God by looking for Him_ , Father O’Malley told him once, at a Sunday school, at a funeral, at the police station. _You find God and see the world through love of Him_.

Yet Ronan holds his breath, Spirit blown into Man shaped from Earth creating Life, and he looks.

Carefully, far more careful than he deserves, blood is wiped from Ronan’s face, the sting of it hidden beneath the gentle crease in Adam’s brow, the callouses of his hands, the heat of them where they brush against his skin. The only parts of Adam that are warm, and Ronan finds himself wishing he could warm up the rest. Through sex or setting himself on fire, whichever Adam’s ridiculous self-sufficiency kink would allow.

His eyes are somehow bluer up close, blue surrounding an irregular circle of gold surrounding blackness he wishes could swallow him up. That, too, is sepia, and Ronan would take that over neon any day. The entire fucking world could become the ink of octopi, and as long as Adam’s eyes every once in a while flickered to him, he’d never fucking notice.

He still remembers when he thought it was possible to love someone that wasn’t Adam.

He went to a gay bar once, a spur of the moment decision, a neon sign with two letters dark and a bass line beneath his feet beating in time with the beer and waning adrenaline in his veins. He’d left the car a street or two away, too drunk to swerve come a sudden squirrel on a road and too scared to kill.

A neon signs with two letters dark, and he felt as lost inside as on the street outside. Less cold. Drunker, somehow.

He hadn’t brought his fake ID. He didn’t drink.

He didn’t dance. There were men wanting him to, looks of appreciation and unwanted hands and a slight undercurrent of fear that sent bile rising in his throat and relief surging through his veins.

In a corner, dark and protected by a perverted illusion of privacy, a man had his hands down another’s pants. Not too far from them, another two were making out, tongues glinting in the ever-changing lights above. On the other side of the room, a man pulled a shirt off over his head.

“What’s your name?” someone yelled above music that wasn’t music but also wasn’t the sounds in which he found comfort, and Ronan nearly punched him in the face.

He went to a gay bar once, and it was only once.

A lifetime ago, as Adam applies antiseptic on his cheek. Another dreamer, and still one dreaming of that which he cannot have.

 _Did I come from your rib?_ Ronan wants to ask. _And can I go back?_

 _Did you come from my dreams?_ , and that’s even worse.

 _Thanks for the straight teeth, then_ , and perhaps it isn’t.

The medical kit is shut with a gentle snap and placed back in the bathroom, haphazardly on a shelf. It may fall, startle them both, but the exhaustion in Adam’s bones has seeped through his skin, and another thing is placed into God’s hands.

They lay on the bed and floor respectively, as they have a dozen times before, inches apart, two magnets instinctively repelling one another. If they touched, Ronan knows, the apartment would surely catch on fire and burn them both to crisps, then spread to take the church with them. Just in case.

_(If your eye leads you to sin, gouge it out and cauterise the wound)_

When he was a child, an illness had befallen a couple of the cows on the farm. One early morning, Niall Lynch had taken him out to the barns, bolt gun in hand, and put down the infected cows without blinking. Ronan had watched in horror, too shocked for words and angry for tears, and done nothing, even as his father moved to some of the healthy cows and shot them, too.

Just in case.

A bark from him had pulled Ronan from stupor to action, to half-pulling, half-carrying the carcasses from the barns to a pyre in the yard. The flames had stood tall and poisonous in colour, as was the sickness itself burned and spread in the atmosphere, and the smell had made him hungry.

In the end, there had been nothing left but ash, in his hair and lungs and the air, the smell of it hanging for days. When he closed his eyes, he could smell it still, see the flecks and smoke, the last layer on dying grass. When he opens them, he sees it still, ash, in the colour of Adam’s hair and skin in the darkness, the freckles on his face and neck, his collarbones, his arms and hands. No longer dead, but exhilaratingly alive.

One hundred and twenty-seven, Ronan counts with the gentle puffs of breath on his face. Thirty-three on his hands resting between them.

Had he been a braver man, a crueller one, Ronan would reach out and touch the bruised skin of his knuckles. Run a finger from one callous to another, all four on one hand, three on the other. They would catch on his skin, were they ever to touch. Tear it straight off, probably, in the quiet divinity of night, until Ronan is nothing but bleeding sinew and bones, and he’d let him – he’d let him rip him apart and swallow the pieces until nothing is left of what he’d once been.

_Did I come from your rib?_

_Oh, please, can I go back?_

Had he been braver, and he isn’t a fucking creep. A sinner, yes, an abomination in every way possible, a dreamer, a fucking asshole, but not a creep. Anything but that.

_Please, God, heavenly Father, anything but that!_

Below them, perched on his crucifix eternally, Jesus stares, and He stares at nothing.

In the attic room above, Ronan closes his eyes.


End file.
